Adam Harris

The idea that what you have to do, what I tried to do when I was a teacher, and what I try to do as someone who writes about history, is not necessarily to convince the reader to believe X or believe Y, but it is to lay out all of it.

I'm actually not interested in if you think Thomas Jefferson was evil or good.

What I do want you to do is sit with the fact that he both wrote the Declaration of Independence

And he also wrote notes to the state of Virginia that black people are inferior to whites in both endowments of body and mind.

What I want you to do is to sit with the fact that he wrote, you know, that all men are created equal and that he enslaved 600 people, including four of his own children.

My role is not to tell you what to think, but what I do have to do is present the evidence.

What a teacher does have to do is present the evidence.

What a museum does have to do is present the evidence to say, this is the totality.

This is the full picture.

My understanding is that the presidential house doesn't say,

anywhere, George Washington was an evil man.

George Washington was bad.

What it says is that George Washington did X, Y, Z in the context of founding America, that he stepped down after two terms, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

And also says, and there's this other part of him, that he owned a plantation in Mount Vernon, that as Adam said, he brought his slaves back and forth to avoid having to emancipate them.

And what we as Americans have to do is to sit with all of that.

You know, the thing that I thought about more than anything after I heard about his passing, you know, we've been talking about what it means to have these conversations with your children and to attempt to ensure that they understand their proximity to Black history.

You know, when I told my daughter, who just turned seven, about how Jesse Jackson was with Martin Luther King when Martin Luther King was killed,

it blew her mind right because in her mind martin luther king is this guy from like a long long time ago right like like martin luther king and jesus were around at the same time right and and so for her just to watch in her little eyes be like oh there was a person who was alive until just now who was with martin luther king like who worked with him who was an adult with martin luther king

when he was killed, what it did, I think, was, again, helped remind her that this history that many people say was a long time ago just, in fact, wasn't that long ago at all.

We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual.